Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
Our Orthodox parish has a lot of relatively recent young female converts who come out of the New Age scene and apparently converted to Orthodoxy during the Covid era. Some other women in their circles went Pentecostal. This, combined with the more recent wave of young men into Orthodoxy (like in other Western countries), has recently led to some marriages, and more appear to be on the way.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
The oceans stopped rising?
...one of your examples of a cult of personality around Obama is a misphrased version of his own speech?
Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that, generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless.
This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.
This was the moment when we ended a war, and secured our nation, and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.
He's exhorting the troops ('if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it'), and he's not even saying that the oceans stopped rising but that the rise begins to slow.
Meanwhile, a considerable share of American Protestants believe(d) that Trump is anointed by God to be the President, and the share is not insignificant even if there's a comparison question regarding whether all Presidents are anointed by God.
The God-Emperor stuff was both funny and a satire by someone not a fan of Trump, it was taken up ironically because hell, yeah it was funny and cool at the same time.
I'm not sure what the satire part is in reference to. Probably the first memes I saw about Trump (his campaign didn't instantly take off in the online crowd so it ook a bit of time for them to start accumulating in places where I'd spot them) were God-Emperor memes, presented in a ha-ha-only-serious tone.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6d ago
...aren't Kurosawa and Leone basically currently at the same "they made seminal classic movies but let's face it, appreciating them doesn't really make you a cinephile as such by itself" status?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
Setting aside the whole sustainability of the idea that critiques from some particular viewpoint are somehow invalid because that viewpoint is different from yourself (and it is really a question of perspective - a Communist who attacks Obama for being a neoliberal could claim that the Tea Party types were just demanding Obama to be even more neoliberal than he actually was): no, the example is "There aren't enough Stalins".
Is this a meaningful distinction? It is in this case, since we're specifically talking about cults of personality. If we're talking about parties or ideologies, sure, I could see the point, but we're talking about specific personalities, and in this case a political cult of personality really generally demands complete fealty to the personality, independent of political ideologies. Attacking a personality from the "further same side" is the same as attacking them from the "opposite side" since both are evidence of disloyalty, "further same side" probably even more so. Again, Stalin vis-a-vis Bukharin and Trotsky is a good example.
Another Stalin-related example of how political cults of personality work is a demand that you follow the personality's line even if they make complete u-turns. When Yezhov is Stalin's guy, you agree he's a good Communist; when Stalin gets rid of Yezhov, you agree he was a traitor all along and edit him out of photos. When Stalin declares that Hitler is the greatest threat to Soviet Union there is, you attack Hitler; when Stalin declares that Hitler is OK now and the Western imperialists are the true treat, you change your line instantly and forget your attacks on Hitler even if you're Jewish yourself; when Hitler attacks Soviet Union and Soviet Union allies with the West, you change your line about Western warmongering in the middle of the speech if needed. And so on.
Does this apply to Obama and Trump? I can't think of good examples regarding Obama - Obama changed his line from anti-SSM to pro, but most of his partisans had probably already made the switch already. On the other hand, there just was a case of Trump's actions changing the views of at least a great number of his supporters instantly; the bombing or Iranian nuclear sites, making the GOP support for such strike go from 47% to 77%, meaning that there is at least a large number of Republicans willing to change their stance to Trump's instantaneously.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
Manchin is actually quoted as saying he's doing this "not as a Democrat".
So? He's still a Democrat.
Sanders is claiming that Obama isn't left wing enough, which is a 50 Stalins criticism.
That's not what 50 Stalins means. As it was originally used, it was "Okay, back up. Suppose you went back to Stalinist Russia and you said “You know, people just don’t respect Comrade Stalin enough. There isn’t enough Stalinism in this country! I say we need two Stalins! No, fifty Stalins!”"
It's supposed to be a completely facile pseudocriticism, not an actual criticism that is simply coming from a different direction than where you yourself are coming from. If we loop back to actual Stalin, it was just as dangerous to attack him from the left (like Trotsky did) as from the right (like Bukharin did), originally even considerably moreso. The only way to stay say would have been not to attack Stalin at all but "attack the system" while praising Stalin, like the 50 Stalins example guy does.
And it's not actually hard to find conservatives criticizing Trump.
This is someone obscure enough that I have never heard of them before you linked this, and the whole piece starts with him taling about how his criticisms of Trump get him constantly attacked by dozens of readers. Not a particularly worthy example, this.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
From the right of the party and from the left of the party. (Of course Sanders is technically not a Democrat, but in practice, he was and is.)
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
Imagine thinking a President was practically the Second Coming
The QAnon stuff goes here.
and deifying him in art
...and the "God-Emperor" memes, among others, go here.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
Finland collects fairly granular data on languages spoken in Finland, which are often used as a proxy for "foreignness". Here's a table with the numbers of approximately school age children by language family, showing that a large majority continues to be Finno-Ugric speakers and the next largest groups are Germanic speakers (including Finland-Swedes) and Slavic speakers (including recent Ukrainian refugees).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6d ago
A quick search turned out, in Google, at least this Jacobin article that situates Trump as something different from neoliberalism and indeed opposed to it while also situating him on the Right, yet not calling him a fascist. (This was admittedly after a quick skim, there might be some indication of the last in the other words, but I didn't spot it.) This would mean that there's at least one leftist who is able to do that.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6d ago
I dunno, the sort of a leftist who would have called, say, Obama a neoliberal would be unlikely to call Trump a neoliberal even though Trump's views on economy were to the right of them (or if they did, it would be specifically as an unexpected term with the intent of highlighting that Trump's economic policies aren't as divergent from the standard post-Cold-War Western economic model as he or his fans might like to claim.)
The omnipresent slur (is this even a proper context for the word "slur"?) "mercs" in situations like this interests me. If they're mercenaries, does this mean that they'd instantly switch on the Russian side if they received a better offer?
Otherwise, it should go without saying that they haven't effectively beaten NATO in a conventional land war, since they haven't even beaten Ukraine (=forced it into an unadvantageous peace treaty or even an unadvantagenous frozen conflict situation), and they certainly aren't fighting the full force of NATO.
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